I’m skeptical because of the numbers, if there were 2.2 million genuine defensive uses of guns each year, but on most occasions when someone is threatened the victim doesn’t have a gun at hand (carrying a gun is far less common than not carrying a gun) there should be tens of millions of occasions when a person wasn’t able to save themselves because they didn’t have a gun at hand. That 2.2 million figure implies that about 50% of potential violent crimes and burglaries are thwarted by people with guns at hand. I doubt the figure is that high.

Defensive gun use doesn’t require one to “carry” a gun. I used to live within sight of my mother, I saw a suspicious man walking toward her house, I grabbed a pistol from the closet and went to investigate and found this guy trying to break in. I stopped him, cops came and got him.

The link I gave below puts the number of violent crimes in the US at 386/100,000 and burglaries at 468/100,000, add them together and you get about 900/100,000 over 230 million people that’s about 2.1 million crimes. You can argue that there’s some that goes unreported, but even then that figure of 2.2 million DGU incidents just doesn’t seem realistic to me, the incident you mention would be included in the burglaries statistics, as would similar incidents involving burglaries, if such an incident were common there would be far more than 50% of burglaries thwarted by gun owners as all those thwarted crimes would be included in the list of burglaries.

How rare carrying a gun is depends a lot on location. In high-crime areas, both criminals and the law-abiding are far more likely to carry guns routinely than in more pacific neighborhoods.

DGU’s don’t get officially reported and counted in many cases because they occur in jurisdictions that take your sort of attitude toward gun possession. Unless one is a political contributor or a celebrity, for example, it is effectively impossible to get a carry permit in any urban county of CA. The same is true in many other places – New York and New Jersey are particularly wretched in that respect.

Reporting a DGU in such a jurisdiction will probably not result in police apprehension of your would-be attacker, but it will result in your being arrested for a gun possession offence.

Pretty much all homicides get officially noticed – especially murders – but other gun-involved crimes are often not. In the highest crime areas dominated by street gangs, law-abiding residents don’t report “routine” gun crimes, or many other crimes, because of draconian “no-snitching” policies enforced by gangs.

Even when gangs aren’t a factor, many crimes – even those that don’t involve any use of a gun – don’t get reported because many people feel that police are unlikely to catch the perpetrators. And, as your neighbors the Ozzies like to say, they’re not wrong.

Surveys that pick up things like the approximate number of annual DGU’s also tend to indicate that actual crimes committed annually are a lot higher in number than official police statistics report because many such crimes are never reported to police.

So comparing reported crimes to surveyed DGU’s is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

So the scenario is two neighbors have a dispute, one calls the cop, and then the one that didn’t call the cops shoots the guy that did yet tries to claim self-defense? I don’t think a jury would believe self-defense. Once the other guy called the cops, it was a clear sign he was trying to de-escalate the situation.

If that’s the scenario, I suspect it happens very rarely and when it does happen; it’s not ruled self-defense by the responding police department. In short, I agree with David’s interpretation, Rand’s viewpoint that Andrew has no idea about what makes up the CDC statistics, and Gregg’s opinion that having failed to make a winning argument, the goal posts were moved.

Name calling will not change the fact that you’re making up the scenario as you go along to patch stupid mistakes you made to start with, and/or change the parameters of your scenario to try and make the square peg of your thoughts fit into the round hole of reality.

When I said “The person with the gun will certainly claim it is.” (bold added) to whom did you imagine I was referring to as the people to whom they would be making the claim of DGU? Santa Clause? The Tooth Fairy? Perhaps the Easter Bunny? Obviously they would be required to give their excuses to the police.
This is like spoon feeding a young child.

” “The person with the gun will certainly claim it is.” (bold added) to whom did you imagine I was referring to as the people to whom they would be making the claim of DGU? ”

That would be the claim if asked. You didn’t say who was doing the asking. Could be you. Could be Santa Claus if he was happening by.

You see many of these events ARE NOT REPORTED. That’s why the debate, about how many DGU’s has occurred, exists in the first place. If every DGU resulted in a call to the cops the number would be easy to get and verifiable.

So one cannot just assume that in your scenario the cops were called. In fact by far the chances are that they were not.

So if you are constructing a scenario, and in the general case cops are not called and you don’t mention the cops. Then the cops are not called in your scenario.

So YOU said the cops were not called – by omission. You can’t escape that no matter how hard you try to twist.

That is likely one of the reasons Rand wrote:

“You are once again displaying your profound ignorance of both America and how such statistics are compiled.”

But you probably didn’t stop to think why anyone would say that and how that applies in this case. You just forged on by adding to your scenario after the fact to try and cover up your stupidity.

It failed.

And you are too immature to admit it.

Also as Rand put it:

“There is no way for us to prevent you from clinging to your desperate wishes in defense of your cognitive dissonance.”

Andrew, in such a case the cops WILL investigate. Pulling a gun or displaying it in a potentially threatening manner can and has been prosecuted as “brandishing”. That’s an implied threat of bodily injury or death and you’d better have good reason to have done so. Criminals won’t call the cops, but law-abiding citizens will, and the cops don’t like sorting that out. But they WILL. Depending on the locale and DA, they may almost automatically charge you.

Last time I saw something on this, violent crime rates in the US were about half of those in Australia. The US has DGU, Australia does not.
Sounds about right to me.

We in Australia had a farmer a few months ago who was confronted in his house at about 1 am by a druggie who had broken in. The farmer confronted him with an unloaded 0.22 rifle and the police came and took the farmer’s guns and suspended his shooter’s licence. Also his wife wasn’t allowed to have any guns while living under the same roof even though she had a shooter’s licence.
Australia has the “wildebeeste” strategy for personal defence. Hope that the predators take only the occasional one from the edge of the herd. If you happen to be that one, too bad. The police and government expect you to die quietly without fuss. Evil bastards.

From what I can find violent crime rates in the US are at least double those in Australia:
Robbery: 41/100,000 in Australia vs 102/100,000 in the US
Homicide: 1.1/100,000 in Australia vs 5.3/100,000 in the US

I’ve noticed the same in the UK. Defending yourself is now a crime. And it is no longer a discussion about firearms, because they are outlawing knives, which in practice actually means scissors, screwdrivers and needle nose pliers. It is a real shame, especially since the politicians and royalty are well protected.

If I lived in Australia, the perverse incentive of that policy would be to shoot the fucker and dump the body somewhere remote. If nobody expected him at your place and there was no nexus between the two of you and you could keep your mouth shut, the odds of getting caught would be virtually nil.

A very interesting post, thanks Rand. I’m an NRA member, and my wife and I occasionally shoot at the NRA Headquarters range in Fairfax, VA. I got my first rifle when I was 10 years old. My Dad was a federally licensed firearms dealer (so he could have guns shipped directly to him), and taught me firearms safety, maintenance, and respect from a very early age. Needless to say, I’m a staunch defender of the 2nd Amendment.

Having said all that, I was very skeptical of Kleck’s numbers. The NRA estimates about 300,000 DGU a year, which always sounded reasonable to me. But upon reflection, I think their criteria for DGU are more specifically aimed at people stopping crime. American Rifleman, the NRA’s magazine, has a regular section entitled “The Armed Citizen,” which reprints news accounts of people who defended themselves with firearms. I think the CDC’s survey is a good one, though. It’s certainly hard data, as opposed to guesswork based on crime statistics.

But it is predicates solely on news reports. The question asked in the CDC survey would cover things that never made the news.

I might add that the American media have been known to deliberately omit the fact that an armed person’s successful self-defense involved a gun. There’s little way of telling what percentage of stories about crime averted leave out that detail, though I suspect it may be large. I say this because of one story about some unarmed students who managed to take down someone with a gun. That story went viral, but in a peculiar way. Columnists in papers, magazines, and blogs wrote essentially the same story, about how you are actually better off not having a gun when facing an armed person. That’s the theme, and the story of the Colorado students was then used “as just one example of many.” I haven’t seen many, and none of the columnists cited another story. It may not even have been quite accurate, because one news (not opinion) piece mentioned that one of the students had Mace.

The only other instance I know of unarmed people taking down an armed shooter was the case of two off-duty Navy Seals and an American college football player overpowering an Islamic terrorist on a train in Europe. This guy wasn’t exactly Rambo. He was armed with a Kalashnikov, and the only reason the three Americans had a chance was that this bozo had managed to jam the gun. I wouldn’t even now how to do that deliberately, so I’m guessing he wasn’t one of the ISIS elites.

Well, there was also the case of the Waffle House shooter in Tennessee over the weekend. He managed to kill four before James Shaw, Jr. managed to wrest the gun away from him when the gunman paused (whether to reload or because he’d had a misfire wasn’t clear from what I’d read). Of course, YET AGAIN, the gunman was a known nutter whose guns and had been taken from him but returned to his father, who apparently returned them to him. If true, and the father isn’t prosecuted as an accessory to murder, or negligent homicide, or something along those lines, something’s wrong. As wrong as our “mental health system” is here when it comes to committing people to institutions and keeping them committed when the only thing that keeps them sane enough to be let back out are medications that they can’t be trusted to take.

Burglaries are probably the crime most deterred by DGU, Australia is double the U.S.

The stat that is hard to find is the difference between hot and cold burglaries. Hot being a burglary while the target is occupied, ie people are home, vs cold where the thief waits till people are gone.
The Thiefs preference for hot burglary is that you can steal the tenants personal cash, phone, jewelry etc….

From Kleck’s ‘What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?’Unfortunately, there is no evidence bearing directly on response errors in reporting
DGUs. There is, however, considerable evidence bearing indirectly on the issue. We can begin
with the fact that most DGUs occur away from the victim’s home (Kleck and Gertz 1995, p.
185). In 1993, it was unlawful for anyone to carry a gun off their own property unless they were
among the few people (under 1% back then – Kleck 1997, Chapter 6) who had a carry permit.
Therefore, a survey respondent had to be willing to confess to a crime (unlawful possession of a
firearm) if they wanted to report a DGU that occurred in a public place. The technical literature
on self-report surveys consistently indicates that few people report crimes they did not commit,
and many deny committing crimes they did commit. That is, false negatives greatly outnumber
false positives, so on net surveys underestimate the prevalence of criminal offending
(summarized in Kleck 2001)

Assuming that “1%” is 1% of US adults and “over half means 1.5 million DGU incidents occurred away from home, this means that either many more than 1% of US adults carry guns away from home or up to 50% of people carrying guns legally are involved in a DGU incident each year.

These aren’t my words: “In 1993, it was unlawful for anyone to carry a gun off their own property unless they were
among the few people (under 1% back then – Kleck 1997, Chapter 6) who had a carry permit.”

So what the carry rates are now aren’t relevant to the survey results, and if crime has halved and carry rates have gone up since then are you suggesting that today it’s more like 10 million DGU incidents a year?

This is not likely true that so few people can legally carry guns off their property. Everyone (adult) in Kansas can legally open carry a gun almost anywhere in the state , even in 1993. It is not the only state with legal permit less open carry.

You should spend time learning about gun rights in the various states before you type anything about guns in the US.

“Assuming that “1%” is 1% of US adults and “over half means 1.5 million DGU incidents occurred away from home, this means that either many more than 1% of US adults carry guns away from home or up to 50% of people carrying guns legally are involved in a DGU incident each year.”

People might be willing to admit obliquely to carrying their lawful obtained firearms away from home by saying they “used” them defensively (away from home) to an anonymous private (non governmental) survey (Kleck). Less likely to when asked by a guv survey. Secondly; many folks even before concealed carry pemits in general became fairly common (yes after the 90’s) just didn’t/don’t accept the idea that they are “criminals” for exercising their 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms for their protection. Many people simply belief they have said right regardless of whether they had a government issued permit to carry concealed. In other words many more people back in the much higher crime rate 80’s & 90’s than you realize probably simply chose to carry their firearms on their persons regardless of whether their local/state government agreed to said carryings’ legality.

These sorts of biases, which are inherent in reporting self-defense incidents, can lead to nonsensical results. In several crime categories, for example, gun owners would have to protect themselves more than 100 percent of the time for Kleck and Getz’s estimates to make sense. For example, guns were allegedly used in self-defense in 845,000 burglaries, according to Kleck and Getz. However, from reliable victimization surveys, we know that there were fewer than 1.3 million burglaries where someone was in the home at the time of the crime, and only 33 percent of these had occupants who weren’t sleeping. From surveys on firearm ownership, we also know that 42 percent of U.S. households owned firearms at the time of the survey. Even if burglars only rob houses of gun owners, and those gun owners use their weapons in self-defense every single time they are awake, the 845,000 statistic cited in Kleck and Gertz’s paper is simply mathematically impossible.https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/01/defensive-gun-ownership-myth-114262

You’ll probably get all excited that I’ve used Politico as a reference. But the fact is it’s just math.

The numbers just don’t make real world sense, and no, I’m not all emotional over this, I just thing Kleck is wrong. There’s too much in the way of opportunities for false positives, I’ve known a couple of people that I think would qualify as compulsive liars, if asked if they’d been involved in a DGU event as the hero they’d say yes, and they could run out a wonderful story about their heroism. In his 5000 or so interviews Kleck would certainly strike 50 or so compulsive liars. The claim that false negatives would balance false positives is rubbish, if the National Crime Victimization Survey figure of approximately 100,000 DGU incidents a year is accurate Kleck’s survey and the CDC survey’s would only have the possibility of 3 false negatives (as only about 3 of the 5,000 respondents would actually have been in that position), whereas there’s the opportunity for about 5000 false positives.

Which you have shown no special talent in performing. But for the record, the original link provide Rand has an update. The update does narrow the population dataset to only 15 states. Informed of this Kleck withdrew his paper to recalculate.

The numbers just don’t make real world sense

Perhaps you should reconsider that New Zealand makes up an every smaller percentage of the world’s population than those 15 states.